Technical Field
The present invention relates to a movable body drive device to drive a movable body and a game machine having such a movable body drive device.
Related Art
A game machine such as a reel gaming machine or a pinball game machine is devised to perform renditions that appeal to the visual sense, acoustic sense, or feeling of a player so as to improve the interest of the player. In particular, in order to perform a rendition that appeals to the visual sense of a player, the game machine may have a moving (movable) body, for example, a movable accessory. The movable body is driven by, for example, a stepping motor. A processor unit for rendition (to be simply referred to as a rendition CPU hereinafter) serving as an example of a host control device transmits, to a control circuit of the stepping motor, an instruction for rotating the stepping motor by the number of steps corresponding to a moving distance by which a movable body moves to a designated position depending on a state of game.
In recent years, in order to improve the interest of a player, objects which are mounted on a game machine and to be controlled by a rendition CPU tend to increase in number. For example, on the game machine, in addition to movable accessories, a large number of light sources and a display device such as a liquid crystal display are mounted. For this reason, the number of terminals output from the rendition CPU and a load such as an amount of calculation of the rendition CPU tend to increase. Thus, it is requested to reduce an amount of calculation required to cause a movable body to perform a desired action. At the request, a technique to reduce resources of hardware or software required to control a stepping motor is developed (for example, see Patent Documents 1 and 2).
For example, in a stepping motor drive control device disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 6-189597, a microcomputer generates a four-phase drive control signal depending on an input signal for forward/backward rotation, speed switching, mode switching, or the like to achieve a change of an excitation method, a rotating method, or a rotational speed without increasing the number of circuit components.
In a movable body drive device disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-247833, an action result of a movable body is transmitted to a host control device, and, based on a command from the control device or the action result, a driving unit drives the movable body.